I once met an Irish person who was detained at Beirut Airport when (trying to) leave the country, and who then disappeared into the Lebanese prison system. Really, he just disappeared.<p>Luckily he was allowed to make a call just after being detained, to his friend who worked for the British Council in Beirut. The friend was tirelessly in searching for him and seeking his release. It wasn’t easy.<p>(I met him just after his release, while he was building the courage to try again to leave the country.)<p>Why was he detained? Because his common Irish first name and common Irish surname matched someone on an Interpol list.
Oh, the classic Tuttle <-> Buttle name confusion!<p>I always remember the movie Brazil when I have to interact with a stupid cybernetic apparatus like every big company, where simple programs are the brain and low-paid humans are the actuators.
This is one of the obvious consequences of not having a national identity number assigned to everyone at birth, which exist in most developed countries, except for anglosphere, for some reason.
Objection to ID numbers as a concept aside, I don't think it actually solves the problem this author faced.<p>Fake identities are dime a dozen. It is not exactly hard for an illicit entity to just put some random ID numbers it bought off the dark web on its books. And now you have just made it even harder for the people who had their identities stolen to clear themselves. How do you convince some company drone doing sanction compliance that you didn't actually work for Sanction Circumvention Ltd when your ID number matches the one on their company's payroll files?<p>Not to mention the sanction list is full of foreigners. The American authorities compiling the list aren't going to know what's the national ID of a random Russian or Iranian guy running an import business. So what is going to happen if your name matches someone who's on the list with a blank ID field? Probably the same thing that happened to the author, I guess.
If they put an ID on a sanction list, there’s a possibility to verify it. They could verify that it actually belongs to the person they want to sanction before putting it on the list. Failing that, the actual person can prove that they don’t belong on the list by verifying their identity.<p>Verifying identity is a much simpler problem than establishing identity.
From the article which clearly wasn’t read:<p>> In both cases the courts called for better matching. Compare the date of birth. Compare the middle name.<p>> There is no version of that available to me. The listing has no date of birth to compare. No middle name and no passport number, because the person doesn’t exist. A screening system that does its job perfectly will still flag me, forever, on the only two facts the record contains: a common Irish name and a country.<p>These systems operate by matching as much information as possible. If the information isn’t there but the rest matches (even if it’s just a name) it flags in the system.<p>> Failing that, the actual person can prove that they don’t belong on the list by verifying their identity.<p>Sounds like you should tell the author. They’ve been living with this problem for 6 years but I’m sure your zero experience with these systems or trying to deal with it will help him immensely.
> If they put an ID on a sanction list, there’s a possibility to verify it<p>They didn't care to figure out if the Sean Byrne of County Sligo actually existed before putting the name on the list. I doubt they would bother verifying an ID number.<p>Plus, going back to my point about the list being full of foreigners, how do you verify the validity of a foreign ID number and address? Maybe Ireland is going to comply with a US request, but many other countries won't, and you are now back to square one.
> It is not exactly hard for an illicit entity to just put some random ID numbers it bought off the dark web on its books. And now you have just made it even harder for the people who had their identities stolen to clear themselves.<p>The idea is you largely prevented the theft, and made it easier to prove, by linking to a physical verifiableb address.
How the identity number would help? It's not like terrorists tell each other their identity numbers. So if the LEOs learn about a terrorist guy that goes around under the name "Sean Byrne", how would they know which ID number that is? And even if I needed some ID number to put on my fake documents, it's easy to download one of the dozens data dumps on the darknet now, and just use any of the IDs there. The LEOs then have a choice - put that number into their ban database (therefore banning some innocent person whose only fault is that he made a mistake of participating in the economy) or go just by the name (which is not better). Don't see how it changed anything.
How so? The article is talking about a fictitious person that's listed by name only on a sanctions list despite the government knowing the person doesn't exist. There is no possibility of the real Sean Byrne presenting a government number that is a negative match against the list because the fake Sean Byrne has no known ID to match against. The essence of the entry is just "here's a name to avoid".<p>The real Sean Byrne can produce a government-issued passport number, but that's clearly not enough for Apple.<p>I think it's more of a problem of all these "hyperscale" platforms where the cost of not being zealous enough is long litigation and devastating fines, while the cost of losing a single customer (or a thousand) is basically nil. This leads to all kinds of opaque, customer-hostile outcomes like this, also if you trip some filters not related to sanctions / mistaken identities. There's a recurring theme of HN posts along the lines of "an automated process at Google cut my business off, HN plz help".
in Egypt, every person is born with a universal national ID number , which is standardized everywhere here, but it created some problems, it became extremely valuable to attackers.
If leaked, it can be reused across completely different services ( and you can never change it under anycase )<p>Having the full name + national ID was enough to bypass verification and activate various services, and many people weren't tech savvy enough to realize how dangerous it was to share or leak that info
No, the problem is the due-process-free list of government-designated undesirables
I'm from Greece, where I have a national identity number. In fact I've had several (maybe half a dozen?) national identity numbers. You see, the national identity number is, literally, the number on your national identity card, or in other words the serial number of the document; not the person. When the document changes, the number changes with it.<p>Same as with passports. Even in the Anglosphere people have passports with passport numbers. They could be used to uniquely identify the passport holder, except of course there are many passports, and therefore, many numbers, for each passport holder.<p>Small problem? Just update whatever database is holding the information for sanctionted persons (or, indeed, persons who should not be sanctioned)?<p>Turns out, that is not a small problem.
> You see, the national identity number is, literally, the number on your national identity card, or in other words the serial number of the document; not the person. When the document changes, the number changes with it.<p>In Singapore, your number is fixed, even when they give you a new document.
Its not as if it even helps since the numbers can be leaked and stolen and then abused & the situation ends up even worse since it is so centralised.
Identity numbers being abused is a consequence of them being misused. And as far as I can tell, this happens more often with american SSNs than anywhere with actual national identity numbers.<p>All that these numbers do is uniquely identify people. They aren't private. To actually prove your identity, you present your ID, passport, or a digital signature tied to that identity number.
You’re talking about different things. Sweden has personal identity numbers and they’re public information. It protects you from being mixed up with someone with the same name. Not from identity theft though.
In most countries you cant do anything with a single number id of a person. Except ironically the US so youre doubly so off.
Unique identifiers should be public. There shouldn’t be any leaking.<p>That also means they should be used simply as an <i>identifier</i> and not as any for of authentication or secret knowledge.
We just need untheivable unlosable numbers /i
It helps. Period.
Ireland has a PPS number which everyone who’s ever had a job or claimed government benefits has. The union of those sets is basically everyone. Clearly that hasn’t helped.
That is far from everyone.
Well.. yea, because it's the US that creates the list, and they don't know or understand that systems like ID numbers exists.
Or they understand that ID numbers are a less than perfect way to identify people.<p>I’m applying for a second citizenship. That means that I can have two national ids that are unlinked. In the US, you can petition to have your SSN number changed, as well, so that doesn’t work. If you are willing to commit crimes and lie, it isn’t that hard to spin up an entirely new identity. Some people are born to parents that don’t notify the government. The real world is incredibly messy.<p>If I were to be placed on a list with one passport/id, I could just use a different one.<p>The bigger issue is that the list is meant as a risk alert, but companies treat a match as truth because the penalty for doing business with a sanctioned entity is far higher than whatever they might lose by not hiring someone mistakenly.<p>What you need, at minimum, if you are going to make these lists is an easy way for false positive people to prove they aren’t the person named (tsa/homeland security have a “redress number” you can provide if you have the same name as someone on their list). Then a legal requirement that anyone checking this list must also ask for additional documentation if they are making a decision based on a hit.
Americans use their social security numbers like id numbers in all sorts of systems. This problem has nothing to do with id numbers.
He has a passport with a number on it. Why isn't that sufficient? There are also multiple countries involved in this story.
America has social security numbers. U.K. has national
Insurance numbers, Ireland had a PPS and Canada has an SIN
National ID numbers will not help with cross border situations like this.
Tony Blair joined the chat
UUIDv7 for all!
I mean in theory, it doesn't have to be a serial number, and I think that's better. Something about it suggests being enlisted in a national army.<p>It says the state assigns "A body" a number.<p>-vs-<p>The state is made up of us as individuals.<p>So while the serial keyfield is a data engineers dream, politically I'd welcome something more personal.<p>Time of birth/parents and other identifying information is on our birth certificates in the UK. Concatenate some of that.<p>I could be.<p>DavidAndrewEvans-01011980-0036-MRI-JeanDavis-AlexEvans<p>Name-DOB-TOB-LocationCode-Parent(s)<p>Location of Birth like an airport code - MRI (Manchester Royal Infirmary), Parent(s)... i mean we can use their birthdates too.<p>I actually quite like the idea of it. It seems intrinsically validating to a person to identify them in this way.
The problem with that is that it leaks too much information to anyone seeing it — this is bad if it needs to be used with any party you might not trust (or not trust their security). Serbia (former Yugoslavia) already does something similar since 1970s, and your Unique Citizen Number (JMBG) is derived from your date of birth and county of issuance (usually birth county) and sex at birth, a couple of digits and a single digit checksum.<p>Ideally, government could issue a cryptographically signed ID, so anyone with access to countries' public key can verify authenticity (with revocation mechanism built-in for both individual keys and all keys signed with one government — this is where it gets tricky). Obviously, governments become new CAs, and people in them can provide fakes when they want if they are corrupt, but anyone can easily validate it.
Names and even dates of birth aren't consistent enough in records for this.<p>You're reinventing a natural key with a bunch of identifiers which aren't stable enough.
Yes. And they should be tattooed onto the person's arm, so there can be no mistake. Maybe a bar code?
I wish people were assigned a identity certificate with public and private key at birth.
Multiple distinct sets of such things would be better.
What happens when they lose it? What happens when someone else gets a copy of the private key?<p>What happens when every app, website, and mobile OS requires a signature for every single post or message, tying all communication to an identity that the government can retaliate against?<p>This creates many more problems than it solves.
I agree and believe revocation is the most important problem.<p>With services requiring it, you can just not use them: as long as it does not get mandated (unfortunately, a direction we are heading in), hopefully market self-regulates and privacy conserving options win.<p>Yes, we all know that's not how that movie plays out :)
The private key would be generated and stored on the most secure hardware security modules like how AWS stores many billions of symetric and asymmetric keys.
For the 0yr-old to keep private?
<i>for some reason.</i><p>The reason is there. It's no big secret. Pick up a history book.
Attaching numbers to people is unbelievably creepy. My identity is not a number. We recoil at the idea of having assigned and tattooed numbers on our bodies and I don't feel it's okay to do it, just so you could maybe avoid misidentification.
You are the one somehow conflating an identity card with your actual identity as a self, which seems extremely strange and spurious.
The one conflating the two isn't the author, but the state. A fixation on the state sanctioned representation of someone's identity instead of the actual, living person himself is exactly what caused TFA's author troubles.
You could ask every company to have a specialized department to handle investigations for these nuanced cases... or you could rely on the state/nation to give you some actual assuranced. National ID solves this. Does Apple have the budget? Yes, but then are smaller companies justified for fucking up? Wouldn't a more objective, verifiable, and automatable procedure be preferred to level the playing field?
The problem seems to be that the state has no other way to really identify them differently, also as one of them doesn't exist. An actual identity identifier would have solved this from ever occurring.
Why did it need to go to tattooed numbers?<p>Also the implication that cultures and countries which have happily accepted id numbers are filled with non individualistic people is it?
> Why did it need to go to tattooed numbers<p>Many countries have laws about having to carry an ID on you all the time. Not as bad as a tattoo, but still not acceptable IMO.<p>> Also the implication that cultures and countries which have happily accepted id numbers are filled with non individualistic people is it?<p>Are we really gonna keep pretending there are no differences between cultures?
Very few countries require you to carry an ID. Many countries require you to own one and keep it up to date, but don't care whether you carry it outside.<p>Also, I find the point kind of moot for the US where a driving license is essentially an ID card, you have to carry it to drive, and you have to drive to go anywhere in most places.
So that you could not impersonate some other identity. Same in the spirit of carrying a plastic card, just without somebody touching you by force.<p>Either way you are branded forever.
Is your identity a string of letters? Don't be ridiculous.
Yes, if there is a set of strings that can uniquely identify you, and you can't have it removed, nor act like somebody else, it's your identity.<p>Even GDPR admits it
This scares me! Denial of service (in some cases you may not even have an alternative), in some cases custody, et cetera and that too based on a false positive or a flimsy match. And no one doubles checks it, no one bothers to make sure, and they are allowed to do that! All this is actual legal and no one pays for it once it's found out, and even if you have suffered. None.<p>And heaven's forbid if your actual ID and references (i.e you) have ended up in such places (or such list/s) by mistake or malice.
What makes me kind of angry is this is a totally and easily fixable problem but for whatever reason, the people who could do something about it have no desire for improvement and would happily let the cost and inconvenience continue.<p>Not one single person in that system thinks the very obvious "A name without any other data is worthless, let's just delete it from the list".<p>If people lack agency then you already have an ineffective system but my guess would be that no-one person has the authority to take executive action and every change however daft takes 30 people in a meeting discussing it for an hour so it just gets left as it is.
I assure you there are several Sean Byrnes in Sligo, and at least one in Drumcliff
Something like this happened to me and it has cost me $20k+ over time, <a href="https://areoform.wordpress.com/2021/08/06/on-apples-expanded-protections-for-children/" rel="nofollow">https://areoform.wordpress.com/2021/08/06/on-apples-expanded...</a><p>Mercury unblocked my accounts because their founder is a very kind man who bothered to verify what the document actually says rather than falling back to, "Computer says no." But everywhere else? De nada. Computer says no.<p>And it's not even me. It's a fuzzy match with someone in their 50s. Doesn't matter. Computer says no.<p>And I can't "get off the list" because it's not me who's on the list. The computer will always say no.<p>In the long run, I'll be fine. I think. But I'll pay $100k+ by the time it's over. These systems are being steadily expanded, as the dumbest incarnations of themselves. We've gone from Thin Thread <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread</a> to crappy fuzzy matches on shoddy data executed on with 0 diligence. It's the stupidest possible timeline.<p>I think many, many other people will be sharing our fate soon, which is partly why I've been writing about this slow rolling train wreck in motion in bits and pieces.
Terrorism went from "kill one person to scare millions" to "stir shit up to cripple the adversary with the costs of prevention".
That is the fundamental of guerrilla warfare. The guerrillas can't win but can loose with very little cost while the cost for the established side to "Win" is an order of magnitude more.
"Encourage your adversary to do more of the thing they've been pushing for half a century."
After 9/11 (and long before), the majority of historians and academia warned that the political response to terrorism — the destruction of civil liberties, implementation of mass surveillance, Islamophobia, populism — were a greater threat and risk to our freedoms than the terrorists ever were.<p>I remember, after the Snowden leaks, when anyone warned that governments could use the patriot act and the various other "intelligence" power grabs to destroy democracy and implement totalitarian dictatorship, they would be deemed insane conspiracy theorists. The hilarious part is most of them (including me) were warning about a distant future... yet it barely took a decade for America to collapse into fascist populism, declare ANTI-FAscists the real terrorists, and turn the surveillance apparatus against them.
"The evil, I can tolerate; but the stupidity..." -Hubert Farnsworth
May be you need to change your name to something unique like Ackfknetce. That will be cheaper.
How can you possibly afford to pay $100k for something like this? That’s so much money!
>It started rather innocuously. Someone couldn’t send me money.<p>You need a Monero. It's the only damn cryptocurrency that's used.<p><a href="https://getmonero.org" rel="nofollow">https://getmonero.org</a>
I believe this real Sean Byrne should move into Sligo for a while, just to spice it up a little. Then they can also ask to be removed from the list as the person on the list.
This has been going on for a long time. In the early 2000s I knew someone with the relatively common name Ian Smith who was routinely held up in airports because someone else with that name was on a watch list. I think in the end he managed to get some kind of stamp in his passport that officially said "not <i>that</i> Ian Smith", and it seems mad this isn't easier to resolve these days.
The App Store as the only way to install apps is the worst part about iOS and why I'll never use it again.<p>I'm always helping friends with piracy and I have to tell them they can't conveniently use a native app because it isn't listed on the App Store.<p>And then there's the removal of ICE apps.<p>It's too much control. On iOS, if the government banned Signal, Apple could enforce it. On GrapheneOS, you can use whatever app from anywhere no matter what.
Once Android developer verification rolls out globally, Alphabet Inc. in Mountain View and the US sanctions and export controls list will become the sole arbitrer of accepted software publishers. Only minority platforms like GrapheneOS, Mac OS X, Win32, Linux remain as free general computing operating systems.
If a government entity would work like this, all heck would break loose.<p>Trying to contrast this to the EU's attempts to force <i>only</i> gatekeepers (those companies so large that there is no alternative to dealing with them) to open up systems, <i>even</i> at the cost of damaging e.g. apple's valiant and welcome attempts to protect the privacy of its customers, highlights to me that the EU is completely correct in doing so.
Yes, the posted story has so many layers of wrongness in it — it's hard to pick just one.<p>None of it would be a problem without the App store in its current form though.
You can't seriously match people on first and last name and claim "fully matched".<p>Think of how manny John Smiths there are?<p>How can this be the company started by Wozniak and Jobs ...
As a guy named Chris Smith, I can tell you, people do absolutely "match people on first and last name", and it causes me no end of trouble.
I failed a background check once because they even ignore middle name/initial. The record in the system had a different MI and I provided mine. Also, birthdate, location, race, etc., were all mismatched. Thankfully, in that case, I was able to provide documentation that I was not a match, but it is incredibly frustrating to have false positives and no "this is positive but it is obviously a partially incorrect match. In the OP's hypothetical about a pre-screening background check, you might never get the opportunity to clear your name.
They do unfortunately. I know someone with a more unusual surname who was getting chased for the debt of someone with the same name. It happens.
You’re presenting this like a mistake born out of incompetence.<p>It isn’t. The institutions involved simply don’t care whether they are destroying the lives of random people. At all.<p>And why should they? They are completely unaccountable in practice, sometimes even in theory.
> How can this be the company started by Wozniak and Jobs ...<p>The same Jobs that routinely denied publicly that he was the parent of his daughter, even though he knew? The same Jobs that cheated Wozniak financially? The same Jobs that led to a change in legal legislation on how organ transplants work?<p>The world needs to move on from this marketing bs that he was somehow a "great" man who is morally solid and must be doing the right thing. Apple is precisely the company founded by Jobs.
No-fly lists are sort of bonkers in this way.<p>Firstly you have the issue that many terrorists are going by a <i>nom de guerre</i> rather than their legal or birth name.<p>Then, of course, your terrorists will have common names. How many Mohammeds are you gonna list?<p>Lastly is transliteration. Your no-fly list is in Latin characters. But your terrorists have Arabic and Persian and Hindi and Cyrillic names. So what do you do. Transliteration is an inexact science, and there are often many branching methods of doing it.<p>So no-fly lists are based on fuzzy matching common pseudonyms. It's a farce, really it is.
Not exactly the same still i would like to share my horror story.<p>Google decided to ban my many years old account. Reason: account created by computer program. Likely flagged me because i use multiple computer and connect from other wifi.<p>Whats worse is i am a monetized youtube partner with million+ views. Youtube support (@TeamYoutube) just say "it is a google problem"<p>All appeals are handled by bots, there is no way to reach an actual human being.<p>We are being controlled by our ai overlords. Some bot on some cpu can ruin your life on a whim.
The recurring recipe for Jill Bearup has been after exhausting all the "appeal" and "support" processes which are hopeless and either can't or won't help, to ask for the underlying data so that you can understand their decision. In the EU [and because it was once a member of the EU when this rule was enacted, the UK] you're legally entitled to that data because you are its subject.<p>So far, getting the data hasn't happened once AFAIK but magically she's unbanned/ unblocked/ whatever.
One option might be for the real Sean Byrne to move to the address in Sligo of the fictitious one, then ask to be removed from the Entity List on the grounds that he is a real person. I think that wouldn't work, and could be life-changing in a bad way, but it's an idea.
Ah, yes, irreversibly linking himself to the same address and adding an impersonation criminal charge will improve his situation a lot!
It might result in his address and birth date being added to the entry on the Entity List, now that the authorities have gained knowledge of that additional information. ;)
I got temporarily banned from the Sun Java Forums years and years ago because of something like this. I tried creating a few test accounts and it seemed to be the first name, not even the full name, that was the "match" ! I assume someone on the list had an alias of just "Dave" or "David" and whoever implemented the filter had just done the easiest thing possible.<p>Not really a life-altering inconvenience, and the other forum members got sufficiently uppity that they re-reviewed it and let me back in, but it was a good lesson in how big orgs have no innate common sense.
Honestly the best thing to do might be to change your name at this point. I'm glad my name is not common, this kind of issue is going to only get worse in the future.
I get phone calls for a guy named Randy about his business. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to make the phone calls stop.<p>The simplest solution is to change my phone number. But<p>a) why should I have to? it’s my number, dammit!<p>b) how many accounts have 2FA? if I changed my number, what if I miss updating one that’s important?<p>c) it could happen again<p>If I change my number, however, that is the simplest way to solve the problem. It’s just, do I want to?
2FA over SMS is stupidly bad. It's worse than TOTP in every aspect including this reason. It is also much less secure. You could start switching accounts to TOTP regardless of this and then decide if you want to switch your number later when you have the option.<p>TOTP is portable and can be backed up.<p>I went a little bit off on a tangent, the stupidity of SMS 2FA is a pet peeve of mine.
If I lose my phone I have no totp access or sms access<p>I walk to the local phone shop and get a replacement sim for my number with a few of bits of ID and I regain sms access. Totp access is gone forever.<p>It’s clearly not worse that totp in every way.
Only if you don't backup your TOTP tokens. Just like you lose your photos when you lose your phone. One of the main advantages of TOTP is that it is portable and can be backed up.<p>> I walk to the local phone shop and get a replacement sim for my number with a few of bits of ID and I regain sms access.<p>Or someone else gets access to your SIM by sim swapping you, which is not as stupidly easy as it used to be, but still SMS remains insecure. Building an authentication system on it is just a bad idea from virtually every angle.
I suggest exporting your password manager && your topt keychain onto an encrypted flash drive. I went through the horrors of having a phone die on me after migrating my topt to a local solution. Having a valid login cookie on bitwarden on my laptop was the only thing that saved me.
I agree but there are so many places that demand only SMS 2FA
We managed to get given a drug dealer's former landline, and had to get it changed after strange calls in the middle of the night. Then our neighbours got the same number after about a year and had the same issue.
That is trading one problem for another: when the name on your birth certificate doesn't match the name on your government issued ID, certain other government entities tend to deny you services.
This is the case for me - since the age of 4 or 5. I don’t live in the US but have lived and worked in 3 different countries and the only time it was an issue was getting married. Everything else - bank accounts, drivers license, residency permits, employer background checks, etc were no problem.
I would think that changing the last name only should be fine though, since up until somewhat recently, most women changed their last names when they got married, so most systems should be equipped to handle this.
You would think. But that's not always the case: Florida residents face driver’s license denials over mismatched documents <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FSwv_D8gxw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FSwv_D8gxw</a> (Now, it's Florida, which may partly explain the idiocracy.)
It used to be very common for migrants to change their surnames, although less so now. There used to be a person who wrote about Scottish Lithuanians called John Millar, who was born as Jonas Stepšys. Noam Chomsky had said that his family's surname was substantially altered after they went to the USA.
In some countries you can get a new birrh certificate with your new name.
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No, the best thing to do is get the press involved and make Apple and ideally the US gov fix their incompetent handling of this.
Given a US senator was "on" the post-9/11 no-fly list for the same stupid reason, merely making noise and getting the press invlolved isn't enough to fix the deeper problem.<p><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ted-kennedys-airport-adventure/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ted-kennedys-airport-adventure/</a>
In Ireland you can use the Gaelic spelling and probably get away with it. Poof, no matches for Seán Ó Beirn.
Well, until they decide that a name change is inherently suspicious under these circumstances, and things get even worse.
Its not always possible, some countries make it pretty hard to do a change of name
What name do you suggest they choose, "Roger Thornhill" perhaps?
The reason Apple or Google or Microsoft don't care one way or the other is their directors rarely if ever suffer from their policies. We should try to make them.<p>The way to retaliate against those stupid lists and the stupid way they are enforced by US companies could be to register a fake company with principals named Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Donald Trump, etc. (and many other people with less well-known names, but high up in various organizations) and somehow get that company and all its employees' names on a sanctions list?<p>Not sure what it would take to work, but it would probably be fun.
Background check softwares do this too.<p>Some of the low cost options now a days do not have human in the loop. They often miss obvious red flags or do too much false positives.
> Asked about it, the head of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center said Robert Johnson would never get off the list, and that anyone with the name would be inconvenienced every time they tried to check in.<p>(Said person was already in prison.)<p>So essentially, the federal government and three letter agencies are propagating the crime. The original person did something which presumably violated other people’s rights. Now the federal government continues to violate people’s rights by essentially lying about who’s actually a threat.
I used to own a very small, very niche retail business that produced a specific part for analog synthesizers. I had customers in literally nearly every nation on earth, and I was surprised by how many times I received returned package for shipping to a person who was “sanctioned” by the US Government. It was probably something like 1 out of every 100 packages. In each case, the person on the receiving end was surprised to hear about the sanction and I honestly believe most were mistaken identity like the article in this post. When it happens, it’s nearly impossible to do anything about it.
Imagine now incorrectly being on the no-fly list. It requires no conviction and has no appeal.
I found some very intriguing/disturbing things while I was paying for full access on Ancestry.com. Those genealogy sites have powerful searches over a lot of public-records databases if you pay them enough. So naturally, I investigated myself.<p>One of the biggest mind-benders was finding a person with a string of addresses going back 25+ years. Now I've lived in this area for 27, and for some reason, this person's addresses all coincided with mine. They had lived near every residence I ever had; they lived within a stone's throw of every clinic, every church, my college, every place I had a relationship with. One such person's "last known address" was an exact match for my previous address: apartment number and all. I found a profile on Facebook but it is unknown if these are real persons, or fictitious entities in the public record for some purpose.<p>Then, I found a person who seems to be real (has a Facebook profile with photo, lists a real place of employment, etc.) She shared my exact surname and had a given name that matches my ethnicity. She lived at the same street address for a long time, albeit a different apartment number. I was receiving mail for her.<p>At some point, this phantom wife/sister was conflated with me in the public record. Obviously someone got her unit number wrong if I got her mail. But my phone number was eventually listed as hers. She has found herself in debt, and is sometimes referred to a collection agency. I've gotten no less than 3 separate inquiries for delinquent debts, that are <i>clearly not mine</i>, that start coming through because her contact info is utterly conflated with mine, and apparently no valid, current info is giving them any leads.<p>The crazy thing I learned last year is that a collection agency doesn't need to divulge any details of the debt they hold to the person they contact. It is incumbent on the contactee to verify whether they reached the wrong person. I began following CFPB instructions on disputing the debt, but the collections agency clammed up and refused to answer any questions until I answered theirs (registered on their website, divulged a lot of PII). However, the joke's on them, because it is very easy to review credit reports and determine whether a debt is or isn't on my own record.
>The Robert Johnson they kept being confused with wasn’t a man named Robert Johnson. It was a known alias of someone convicted of plotting to bomb a Hindu temple and a cinema in Toronto<p>Also, sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads, so you gotta be careful.
Hahahahahaha<p>I appreciate the humor and musical knowledge<p>And I'm surprised that your joke didn't get more laughs or comments on HN. There is life outside of screens ;)
Fellow traveler, my takeaway was that the author didn’t address the elephant in the room, which is that his name is within Soundex/ Levenshtein distance of “Sean Bean” who played a terrorist in Patriot Games, so I chalk this up as another win for our government’s incredibly well-designed security state keeping me safe from imaginary threats. Good reading for today: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/aug/15/art-spiegelman-the-us-needs-a-counter-revolution" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/aug/15...</a>
Seems fair - <a href="https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/firm-in-alleged-iran-trade-deal-to-pay-cab-1.5m/a/147788489.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/firm-in-alleged-iran-t...</a>
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